Outils pour utilisateurs

Outils du site

Hélène Lenoir - ensemble de l'oeuvre

Documentation critique

BERNARD, Luscans, « The Representation of Objects in the New New Novel », thèse de doctorat, department of Romance Langages, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2008, 363 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

### AbstractThresholds of Meaning examines contemporary French narrative and explores two related issues: the centrality within recent French fiction and autofiction of the themes of passage, ritual and liminality; and the thematic continuity which links this work with its literary ancestors of the 1960s and 1970s. Through the close analysis of novels and récits by Pierre Bergounioux, François Bon, Marie Darrieussecq, Hélène Lenoir, Laurent Mauvignier and Jean Rouaud, Duffy demonstrates the ways in which contemporary narrative, while capitalising on the formal lessons of the nouveau roman and drawing upon a shared repertoire of motifs and themes, engages with the complex processes by which meaning is produced in the referential world and, in particular, with the rituals and codes that social man brings into play in order to negotiate the various stages of the human life-cycle. By the application of concepts and models derived from ritual theory and from visual analysis, Thresholds of Meaning situates itself at the intersection of the developing field of literature and anthropology studies and research into word and image.

### Abstract
Hélène Lenoir is a contemporary French writer of novels and short stories who has been published by Les Éditions de Minuit since 1994. She writes about the difficulty to communicate within the family circle and about the words of conversation that remain in the mind of the character. This work aims at defining “the unspoken”, starting from what is said, then moving on to what is not said, in a thematic rather than chronological approach. This study asks two main questions. The first one concerns the supposed link between Hélène Lenoir and Nathalie Sarraute: to what extent is Hélène Lenoir linked to Nathalie Sarraute? The second question deals with the originality of an experimental writer: where does Hélène Lenoir fit within the contemporary spectrum? The study examines how Hélène Lenoir writes the unspoken and how the character lives with the others in a world defined by its inability to communicate. The first chapter studies the way people talk to each other. It reveals the link with Nathalie Sarraute and comes to the conclusion that with his family or with his lover, the character communicates with violence or lament and is always in conflict. The second chapter draws a parallel with Sarraute sub-conversation. It reveals the sensations that prevent the character from speaking freely to the other in the dialogue and from expressing his own thoughts within the monologue. In the third chapter, we study the link between what the character has experienced in the past, the anguish he feels in his daily life and his inability to communicate. The last chapter analyses the exhaustion of the character who feels trapped in a love relationship and who is bound by his loneliness to live with the unspoken. ###